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Why is Quality, again, not included among the Primaries?
Because like Quantity it is a posterior, subsequent to Substance.
Primary Substance must necessarily contain Quantity and Quality
as its consequents; it cannot owe its subsistence to them, or
require them for its completion: that would make it posterior to
Quality and Quantity.
Now in the case of composite substances- those constituted from
diverse elements- number and qualities provide a means of
differentiation: the qualities may be detached from the common
core around which they are found to group themselves. But in the
primary genera there is no distinction to be drawn between
simples and composites; the difference is between simples and
those entities which complete not a particular substance but
Substance as such. A particular substance may very well receive
completion from Quality, for though it already has Substance
before the accession of Quality, its particular character is
external to Substance. But in Substance itself all the elements
are substantial.
Nevertheless, we ventured to assert elsewhere that while the
complements of Substance are only by analogy called qualities,
yet accessions of external origin and subsequent to Substance are
really qualities; that, further, the properties which inhere in
substances are their activities [Acts], while those which are
subsequent are merely modifications [or Passions]: we now affirm
that the attributes of the particular substance are never
complementary to Substance [as such]; an accession of Substance
does not come to the substance of man qua man; he is, on the
contrary, Substance in a higher degree before he arrives at
differentiation, just as he is already "living being" before he
passes into the rational species.
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